Chopin: The Man and His Music, James Huneker [free e books to read online txt] 📗

modes. Here the trio is occidental. The entire piece leaves a vague impression of discontent, and the refrain recalls the Russian bargemen’s songs utilized at various times by Tschaikowsky.

Klindworth uses variants. There is also some editorial differences in the metronomic markings, Mikuli being, according to Kullak, too slow.

Mention has not been made, as in the studies and preludes, of the tempi of the Mazurkas. These compositions are so capricious, so varied, that Chopin, I am sure, did not play any one of them twice alike. They are creatures of moods, melodic air plants, swinging to the rhythms of any vagrant breeze. The metronome is for the student, but metronome and rubato are, as de Lenz would have said, mutually exclusive.

 

The third Mazurka of op. 24 is in A flat. It is pleasing, not deep, a real dance with an ornamental coda. But the next! Ah! here is a gem, a beautiful and exquisitely colored poem. In B flat minor, it sends out prehensile filaments that entwine and draw us into the centre of a wondrous melody, laden with rich odors, odors that almost intoxicate.

The figuration is tropical, and when the major is reached and those glancing thirty-seconds so coyly assail us we realize the seductive charm of Chopin. The reprise is still more festooned, and it is almost a relief when the little, tender unison begins with its positive chord assertions closing the period. Then follows a fascinating, cadenced step, with lights and shades, sweet melancholy driving before it joy and being routed itself, until the annunciation of the first theme and the dying away of the dance, dancers and the solid globe itself, as if earth had committed suicide for loss of the sun. The last two bars could have been written only by Chopin. They are ineffable sighs.

 

And now the chorus of praise begins to mount in burning octaves. The C

minor Mazurka, op. 30, is another of those wonderful, heartfelt melodies of the master. What can I say of the deepening feeling at the con anima! It stabs with its pathos. Here is the poet Chopin, the poet who, with Burns, interprets the simple strains of the folk, who blinds us with color and rich romanticism like Keats and lifts us Shelley-wise to transcendental azure. And his only apparatus a keyboard. As Schumann wrote: “Chopin did not make his appearance by an orchestral army, as a great genius is accustomed to do; he only possesses a small cohort, but every soul belongs to him to the last hero.”

 

Eight lines is this dance, yet its meanings are almost endless. No. 2, in B minor, is called The Cuckoo by Kleczynski. It is sprightly and with the lilt, notwithstanding its subtle progressions, of Mazovia. No.

3 in D flat is all animation, brightness and a determination to stay out the dance. The alternate major-minor of the theme is truly Polish.

The graceful trio and canorous brilliancy of this dance make it a favored number. The ending is epigrammatic. It comes so suddenly upon us, our cortical cells pealing with the minor, that its very abruptness is witty. One can see Chopin making a mocking moue as he wrote it.

Tschaikowsky borrowed the effect for the conclusion of the Chinoise in a miniature orchestral suite. The fourth of this opus is in C sharp minor. Again I feel like letting loose the dogs of enthusiasm. The sharp rhythms and solid build of this ample work give it a massive character. It is one of the big Mazurkas, and the ending, raw as it is—consecutive, bare-faced fifths and sevenths—compasses its intended meaning.

 

Opus 33 is a popular set. It begins with one in G sharp minor, which is curt and rather depressing. The relief in B major is less real than it seems—on paper. Moody, withal a tender-hearted Mazurka. No. 2, in D, is bustling, graceful and full of unrestrained vitality. Bright and not particularly profound, it was successfully arranged for voice by Viardot-Garcia. The third of the opus, in C, is the one described by de Lenz as almost precipitating a violent row between Chopin and Meyerbeer. He had christened it the Epitaph of the Idea.

 

“Two-four,” said Meyerbeer, after de Lenz played it. “Three-four,”

answered Chopin, flushing angrily. “Let me have it for a ballet in my new opera and I’ll show you,” retorted Meyerbeer. “It’s three-four,”

scolded Chopin, and played it himself. De Lenz says they parted coolly, each holding to his opinion. Later, in St. Petersburg, Meyerbeer met this gossip and told him that he loved Chopin. “I know no pianist, no composer for the piano like him.” Meyerbeer was wrong in his idea of the tempo. Though Chopin slurs the last beat, it is there, nevertheless. This Mazurka is only four lines long and is charming, as charming as the brief specimen in the Preludes. The next Mazurka is another famous warhorse. In B minor, it is full of veiled coquetries, hazardous mood transitions, growling recitatives and smothered plaints.

The continual return to the theme gives rise to all manner of fanciful programmes. One of the most characteristic is by the Polish poet Zelenski, who, so Kleczynski relates, wrote a humorous poem on this mazurka. For him it is a domestic comedy in which a drunken peasant and his much abused wife enact a little scene. Returning home the worse for wear he sings “Oj ta dana”—“Oh dear me”—and rumbles in the bass in a figure that answers the treble. His wife reproaching him, he strikes her. Here we are in B flat. She laments her fate in B major. Then her husband shouts: “Be quiet, old vixen.” This is given in the octaves, a genuine dialogue, the wife tartly answering: “Shan’t be quiet.” The gruff grumbling in the bass is heard, an imitation of the above, when suddenly the man cries out, the last eight bars of the composition: “Kitty, Kitty come—do come here, I forgive you,” which is decidedly masculine in its magnanimity.

 

If one does not care for the rather coarse realism of this reading Kleczynski offers the poem of Ujejeski, called The Dragoon. A soldier flatters a girl at the inn. She flies from him, and her lover, believing she has deceived him, despairingly drowns himself. The ending, with its “Ring, ring, ring the bell there! Horses carry me to the depths,” has more poetic contour than the other. Without grafting any libretto on it, this Mazurka is a beautiful tone-piece in itself.

Its theme is delicately mournful and the subject, in B major, simply entrancing in its broad, flowing melody.

 

In C sharp minor, op. 41, is a Mazurka that is beloved of me. Its scale is exotic, its rhythm convincing, its tune a little saddened by life, but courage never fails. This theme sounds persistently, in the middle voices, in the bass, and at the close in full harmonies, unisons, giving it a startling effect. Octaves take it up in profile until it vanishes. Here is the very apotheosis of rhythm. No. 2, in E minor, is not very resolute of heart. It was composed, so Niecks avers, at Palma, when Chopin’s health fully accounts for the depressed character of the piece, for it is sad to the point of tears. Of op. 41 he wrote to Fontana from Nohant in 1839, “You know I have four new Mazurkas, one from Palma, in E minor; three from here, in B major, A flat major and C

sharp minor. They seem to me pretty, as the youngest children usually do when the parents grow old.” No. 3 is a vigorous, sonorous dance. No.

4, over which the editors deviate on the serious matter of text, in A flat, is for the concert room, and is allied to several of his gracious Valses. Playful and decorative, but not profound in feeling.

 

Opus 50, the first in G major, is healthy and vivacious. Good humor predominates. Kullak notes that in some editions it closes pianissimo, which seems a little out of drawing. No. 2 is charming. In A flat, it is a perfect specimen of the aristocratic Mazurka. The D flat Trio, the answering episode in B flat minor, and the grace of the return make this one to be studied and treasured. De Lenz finds Bach-ian influences in the following, in C sharp minor: “It begins as though written for the organ, and ends in an exclusive salon; it does him credit and is worked out more fully than the others. Chopin was much pleased when I told him that in the construction of this Mazurka the passage from E

major to F major was the same as that in the Agatha aria in ‘Freischutz.’” De Lenz refers to the opening Bach-like mutations. The texture of this dance is closer and finer spun than any we have encountered. Perhaps spontaneity is impaired, mais que voulez vous?

Chopin was bound to develop, and his Mazurkas, fragile and constricted as is the form, were sure to show a like record of spiritual and intellectual growth.

 

Opus 56, in B major, is elaborate, even in its beginning. There is decoration in the ritornelle in E flat and one feels the absence of a compensating emotion, despite the display of contrapuntal skill. Very virtuoso-like, but not so intimate as some of the others. Karasowski selects No. 2 in C as an illustration. “It is as though the composer had sought for the moment to divert himself with narcotic intoxication only to fall back the more deeply into his original gloom.” There is the peasant in the first bars in C, but the A minor and what follows soon disturb the air of bonhomie. Theoretical ease is in the imitative passages; Chopin is now master of his tools. The third Mazurka of op.

56 is in C minor. It is quite long and does not give the impression of a whole. With the exception of a short break in B major, it is composed with the head, not the heart, nor yet the heels.

 

Not unlike, in its sturdy affirmation, the one in C sharp minor, op.

41, is the next Mazurka, in A minor, op. 59. That Chopin did not repeat himself is an artistic miracle. A subtle turn takes us off the familiar road to some strange glade, wherein the flowers are rare in scent and odor. This Mazurka, like the one that follows, has a dim resemblance to others, yet there is always a novel point of departure, a fresh harmony, a sudden melody or an unexpected ending. Hadow, for example, thinks the A flat of this opus the most beautiful of them all. In it he finds legitimately used the repetition in various shapes of a single phrase. To me this Mazurka seems but an amplification, an elaboration of the lovely one in the same key, op. 50, No. 2. The double sixths and more complicated phraseology do not render the later superior to the early Mazurka, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that this is a noble composition. But the next, in F sharp minor, despite its rather saturnine gaze, is stronger in interest, if not in workmanship. While it lacks Niecks’ beautes sauvages, is it not far loftier in conception and execution than op. 6, in F sharp minor? The inevitable triplet appears in the third bar, and is a hero throughout. Oh, here is charm for you! Read the close of the section in F sharp major. In the major it ends, the triplet fading away at last, a mere shadow, a turn on D

sharp, but victor to the last. Chopin is at the summit of his invention. Time and tune, that wait for no man, are now his bond slaves. Pathos, delicacy, boldness, a measured melancholy and the art of euphonious presentiment of all these, and many factors more, stamp this